Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Today at the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in Orlando we made a number of significant technology and program announcements to help our customers capitalize on the incredible opportunities provided by big data, advanced analytics and cloud computing. Firstly, data is now the key strategic business asset. Every device, every customer, every activity – everything that’s happening in the world around us - is producing incredibly rich data that can help us create new experiences, new efficiencies, new business models and even new inventions. Leveraging this data can be the differentiator for a business. For example, IDC estimates companies that are leaders in using data assets to their advantage will capture $1.6 trillion more in business value than those that lag behind. While data is pervasive, actionable intelligence from data is elusive. Our customers want to transform data to intelligent action and reinvent their business processes. To do this they need to more easily analyze massive amounts of data – so they can move from seeing “what happened” and understanding “why it happened” to predicting “what will happen” and ultimately, knowing “what should I do”. Only then can they create the intelligent enterprise. The Cortana Analytics Suite brings about this vision by delivering big data and advanced analytics capabilities to help enterprises transform their data into intelligent action. With Cortana Analytics, we are taking years of research and innovation – spanning technology and infrastructure for advanced analytics, including capabilities like machine learning, big data storage and processing in the cloud as well as perceptual intelligence such as vision, face and speech recognition, with the goal of helping enterprise customers make better, faster decisions to accelerate their speed of business. Additionally the Cortana Analytics Suite integrates with Cortana, Microsoft’s digital personal assistant. Cortana works with the Cortana Analytics Suite to enable businesses to get things done in more helpful, proactive, and natural ways. Cortana Analytics Suite enables core analytics scenarios such as real-time recommendations, customer churn forecasting, fraud detection, predictive maintenance and many more. For example, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, the largest hospital in northern New England, is developing a remote monitoring and predictive analytics solution called ImagineCare using the Cortana Analytics Suite. Leveraging predictive analytics, ImagineCare will enable dynamic treatment plans based on the individual patient’s history and profile and patterns observed from a broad corpus of data. ImagineCare aims to significantly enhance patient outcomes by predicting the probability of catastrophic events such as heart attacks and emergency readmissions before they happen. You can see more of the work Dartmouth Hitchcock is doing with Cortana Analytics here. Cortana Analytics Suite will be available later this fall as an integrated offering with a simple monthly subscription model that takes advantage of all the relevant analytics and big data capabilities to make better decisions as well as intelligently automate operations. The offering, while customizable to fit the unique needs of organizations, will also provide preconfigured solutions to speed deployment of common scenarios we see across many industries, such as fraud detection, churn analysis and recommendations. I encourage you to get started immediately with many of its individual services that are already available.

Partner Investments

With Cortana Analytics Suite, partners can now help their customers add intelligence to applications and across business scenarios. Cloud is arguably as big a disruptor in technology as data is and today we’re announcing new programs that help partners accelerate our customers’ transition to cloud computing and embrace and manage the ever growing set of devices we all use to get our jobs done. As my colleague Phil Sorgen discussed earlier today at WPC, we believe that partners are key to helping customers benefit from the cloud. Three programs investments being announced today are great examples of this:

Microsoft Azure and Enterprise Mobility Suite in the Cloud Solution Provider program

Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud Program

Azure Mentor Program

Introducing Azure in the Cloud Solution Provider program (CSP)

Microsoft Azure has joined Office 365, Microsoft Intune, CRM Online and Enterprise Mobility Suite as available services in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Program. The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program puts partners at the center of the customer lifecycle with direct provisioning, billing and support of Microsoft Cloud Services. With CSP, partners own 100% of the customer lifecycle. With Azure now becoming available in CSP, we are introducing a new business model for partners to integrate Azure as part of their own offerings, with a pay-as-you-go consumption model. We are also introducing a new Partner portal and API’s that empower partners to be at the center of the customer experience and enable partners to deliver Azure as part of their offerings and/or deliver managed services around Azure. For more information visit www.microsoftcsp.com

Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) in Cloud Solution Provider program

EMS became available as part of the CSP partner program in March 2015. With the availability of the new API’s for CSP and the multi-channel and multi-partner features, today we are now enabling CSP partners to upsell their existing Office 365 customers with EMS. Existing Office 365 customers will now have the ability to easy take advantage of EMS from their existing or new CSP partner, helping improve the security of their data and devices. For more information on EMS in CSP or to learn more about EMS, please be sure to check out Brad Anderson’s blog.

Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud

Today, we are introducing Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud, to empower service providers to bring hybrid cloud to even more customers. The program enables service providers to deliver Microsoft-certified hybrid solutions that will make it easier for customers to leverage the cloud on their terms, through certified partner solutions and best-practices for hybrid cloud deployments including connections to Azure, globally. The program will also give customers peace of mind that each solution comes with a high degree of technical quality to reduce the risk of deploying and maintaining a hybrid cloud solution. Finally, the program builds on Microsoft’s extensive experience in providing world-class hybrid innovation and partner programs, extending the success of the Cloud OS Network, which has grown to reach over 10,000 customers with over 600 local datacenters globally in under two years. Learn more about the program here and get certified today.

Azure Mentor Program (AMP) for Partners

Over the past year, we have found that some partners need help with the level of transformation required to be able to build an Azure practice. The transformation spans several stages starting from the quoting process, positioning a solution, all the way to post deployment troubleshooting. That is why we are making available the Azure Mentor Program (AMP), which provides partners with technical resources and assistance for a period of six months, covering presales, deployment and post deployment to ensure they have the support needed to build their Azure practices. Over the next year, we will look to assist over two thousand partners via resources from the Global Partner Support team. To find out more about AMP please visit us here. We’ve shared a lot of news today and to get a full list of all that we announced, take a look at the On Microsoft Blog. Through our technology innovations and program investments, our aim is to enable our partners and customers to be successful so they can continue to grow in the years and to come.